The Hype

Do you remember the expression that the boy president from Texas, GWB, struggled to enunciate? It goes something like this, “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice; shame on me.”

So why did we permit the “sky is falling” fear mongers to do it to us again?

The storm of the century.

Did you run out to the store and buy a case of canned soup? Milk? Water jugs? Flashlights? Candles?

Did you turn on the TV and try to find a news program delivering the news and find only the hand wringing fools with their paper mache credentials bewailing the ferocity of the storm? If the wind doesn’t get you the surge will? Were they speaking meteorologically or metaphorically?

At this moment, please just pause and glance over to the right on this page; move your eyes upward just a bit, and read the following words under the caption Worth Pondering, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary,” H. L. Mencken. Who was this guy Mencken? He was a newspaper writer. An essayist. He succeeded and preceded a long list of fellows (mostly) who see events and circumstances and people with a bit of a jaundiced eye. And a lot of angst toward authority or unsubstantiated claims to knowledge and wisdom. Understandably politicians and government folk tend to not fare well in the view of these skeptics.

Here are some other of these recent “fool me once” situations:

Saddam has weapons of mass destruction – nukes, biological, nerve gas…

Al-Qaeda will destroy us if we don’t destroy them first…

Iran, Korea and some other place are the axis of evil. Oh, you can also add in Syria, Cuba and Somalia or Yemen or….

Putin (or Castro or Chavez or….) is a bad guy (notice how we’ve always got at least two or three bad guys at any given time...?)

Irene will devastate the east coast of America (the humor of this current scare is the difficulty in separating the bad news from the good news)

The NEA and AFT are looking out for your kids (perhaps the most tragic of all the hype/scare tactics)

Tax the rich and solve the deficit/debt problem (recent hype from the old Omaha fool)

A drug for every ailment; a treatment for every disease; live forever… (gee, why do you think health care in the US cost 2-3 times as much as most any other developed country?)

Stimulus will create jobs. Keynes said it’s so… (didn't work in 1931; ain't working in 2011)

Deficits and debt don’t matter... (this came from GWB’s sidekick, the incredibly thick skulled and about to be widely acclaimed author of more nonsense from the fear mongering neocon group)

Apparently we’ve been fooled more than twice and that’s just in the last several years. It’s all the same old crap. Scare the people. How did the kid who is now mayor of Chicago put it. “Never let a crisis go to waste.” What he meant, of course, is scare the people and get some more goodies for your voting base. In the process, you may as well help yourself.  In the past even bureaucrats didn't make a hullabaloo out of most calamities.  But a NY businessman turned mayor?  And a reform NJ governor who claims to be in favor of cutting government back?   Do we really need them running around scaring everyone under the guise of taking care of us.  Shutting down public services and ordering folk out of their homes?  Is this the role of government?  Scare and Hype?

Which is what this essay is all about. A few helping themselves to something by using hype and scare tactics. Hype and Scare. Scare and Hype. How and when did we become so gullible to scare tactics? To hype?  What happened to people who look out for themselves and their neighbors?  Responsible people?

Apparently it’s not a new phenomenon. So, lock the door, pull down the shades, pour yourself a stiff drink and think about which one of the new fools you can vote for and hope for real change this time. Oh, by the way, remember to return all that storm crap you bought to the store before it goes to waste. If only we could return the wars and the bombing and the dead and maimed and the teachers unions and the debt and all the other crap we bought because of scare and hype.

Shame on me.